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Overview

Though much has been written about T. S. Eliot since it was first published, Eliot and His Age remains the best introduction to the poet's life, ideas, and literary works. It is the essential starting place for anyone who would understand what Eliot was about. Russell Kirk's insights into Eliot's writings are informed by wide reading in the same authors who most influenced the poet, as well as by similar experiences and convictions. Kirk traces Eliot's political and cultural ideas to their true sources, showing the balance and subtlety of Eliot's views. Eliot and His Age is a literary biography that will endure when much of the more recent writing on Eliot is gathering dust.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

This literary biography is being reissued because editor Lockerd (English language & literature, Grand Valley State Univ.; Aethereal Rumours: T.S. Eliot's Physics and Poetics), who pens a new introduction, feels it is the best such work on poet T.S. Eliot among the many other Eliot biographies published since its initial appearance in 1971 (rev. ed., 1984). Lockerd notes that the book's author, Kirk (The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot), now deceased, was especially qualified to write about Eliot because they were friends toward the end of the poet's life. As a result, the book is somewhat subjective in its adulation as Kirk analyzes Eliot's works and relates them to various aspects of 20th-century civilization. Kirk defines "moral imagination" as a means to establish order in the soul and the commonwealth, and he focuses on Eliot's conservatism, which, opposing both fascism and communism, saw Christianity as the basis for the ideal state. The postscript to the 1984 edition evaluates other works on Eliot and refutes what Kirk called "psychobiographers," or writers attempting to read too much into their subject's life and literary output. A scholarly study recommended for academic libraries not owning the earlier editions.
—Denise J. Stankovics

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

Russell Kirk (1918–94) was an independent man of letters whose best-known book is The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Several of his other books, including The American Cause, The Roots of American Order, The Politics of Prudence, Redeeming the Time, and The Sword of Imagination, are available from ISI Books.

New introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr.

Lockerd is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Grand Valley State University. He is a former president of the T. S. Eliot Society and is currently on the society’s board of directors. His books include The Sacred Marriage: Psychic Integration in “The Faerie Queene” and Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics.

Table of Contents

Introduction to New Edition Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr. xiii
Eliot and the Follies of the Time 1
The Burial of Matthew and Waldo 9
Sir Edmund Gosse and the Hippopotamus 9
The Youngest Eliot of St. Louis 18
Harvard, Babbitt, and Paris 21
Expatriation 29
Rebellion against the Abstruse 34
Hell and Heartbreak House 43
Henry James's Successor 43
Prufrock and Tradition 48
Gerontion and Servitude to Time 53
The Inner Waste Land and the Outer 61
A Criterion in a Time of Hollow Men 77
Raising a Standard 77
Orthodoxy Is My Doxy 87
A Strong Cry from a City Cellar 95
Publishing and Placemen 101
Death's Dream Kingdom 108
Catholic, Royalist, Classicist 111
Pilgrim's Progress Toward Ember Day 111
A Capacity for Salvation 119
Abide with Me 129
Regaining the Higher Dream 142
The Poet, the Statesman, and the Rock 151
Commentaries on a Time of Troubles 151
Enfeebled Heroismand Small Dusty Creatures 159
No Man Is Saved by Poetry 166
Claims of Strange Gods 174
Do Lions Need Keepers? 182
Christians and Ideologues in Heartbreak House 191
The Ideologue Against the Person 191
The Witness of Blood 201
The Loss of a Standard 208
Reunion at Heartbreak House 219
The Communication of the Dead 231
Is a Christian Society Conceivable? 231
The Pleasing Dreadful Thought 239
Still Point and Numinous Depths 245
On the Edge of a Grimpen 249
Fare Forward, Voyagers 254
Redeemed from Fire by Fire 258
Culture and Cocktail Parties 267
All Hallows' Eve, 1948 267
Culture and Class 272
The Blessings of Cultural Diversity 280
The Mystery of the Guardians 285
The Mystery of Martyrdom 292
Illusions and Affirmations 299
Notes towards the Definition of Educational Purpose 299
The Virtue of Resignation 312
The Literature of Politics 323
Age and Decrepitude Have No Terrors 333
The Elder Critic 333
The Last Act at Heartbreak Clinic 341
Belonging to Another 348
In My End Is My Beginning 352
Postcript: Pilgrims in the Waste Land 357
A Note of Thanks 369
Notes 371
Index 385

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